The Silly Magic of Asian Martial Arts versus Reality

 

Qi Ruminations

Jan 22, 2021

 

Qi is a pretty old term, going back at least to the fifth century, B.C. in China.   That long ago, there was not much in the way of science to explain how the world worked, so the ancient Chinese devised their own paradigm in a sort of "Theory of Everything": they used qi as a building block for their hypothesis. 

 

If you look at some of the earliest, primitive drawings in China that show the flow of forces in the human body, you can see the beginnings of the so-called acupuncture meridians through which qi supposedly flows.  The earliest drawings of force paths were crude and there were a limited number of recognized channels or force flow.  The original force-flow lines were probably delineations of the muscles and tendon connections that support strength along different facets of the body.

 

The Chinese, though, recognized something that we in the West seem to have missed, early on.  The Chinese recognized that everything about strength was not just muscle, bones, and tendons as we lift and move things: there are supplemental involuntary assists, like force aiming, etc., built into the body and those involuntary supplements work with the voluntary aspects of bone and muscle.   Since the involuntary-muscle/fascia aspects of strength act to supplement the normal voluntary actions of our strength, the actions of flow of qi tend to overlay the normal channels of our voluntary strength.  In that sense, qi-meridians lay on top of muscle-tendon (Sinew) channels.

 

So, our strength is a function of qi factors.  Cheng Man Ching, in one of his books I read early on, said that qi and strength always go together: if your qi is strong, your strength will be strong; if you are strong, then your qi will also be strong.  Note, however, that the qi needs to be trained to work optimally with the body's strength.  Having strong qi and controlling strong qi are not the same thing.

 

Qi has to do with factors that have to do with strength or enhance or supplement strength.  As time passed, the Chinese mapping of the channels of strength in the body became more sophisticated.  By the time of the drawings that were found in the Mawangdui Tombs (200+ years B.C.) the channel theory of strength (the Jingluo theory) had reached almost the intricacy that it has today.   Bear in mind that much of these discussions in the old days were practical matters about strength and body exercise in rapport with the subconscious mind: traditional Chinese medicine with its myriad examples of putatively different types of qi didn't arise until long after the initial qi discourses.

 

 

 

The Strength of Man

Qi of Heaven, Qi of Man, Qi of Earth

Where the Qi Paradigm Failed

 

The strength of man was originally described, in the qi-paradigm, in terms of the Sancai, the three realms of Heaven, Man, and Earth.   Man has his own strengths of qi, as in the qi of the muscles, the bones, the tendons, and the blood, but Man also has inputs of qi/strength from Heaven and Earth, without whose qi the strength of Man could not exist.

 

From gravity we get two major strength components: the solidity of the ground as the basis of upward forces, and the downward pull of the weight of our body, as the basis of any downward forces we want to apply.  Both the solidity of the ground and the weight of our bodies are functions of gravity.  Gravity is thus the "Qi of the Earth" and without the support coming from gravity, the strength of Man could not exist.

 

The ancient Chinese were clever enough to notice the auxiliary strengths from our involuntary-muscle/fascia systems, controlled by the subconscious/Shen … so it was nothing for them to note how there is some life-important facet to the air that we breathe, the food that we eat, our surroundings, our genetics/heredity, and so on.   The Chinese breathing exercises may have been predated by the breathing exercises of the Indian continent, but that is hard to discern because both places had breathing exercises far back in historical times.  The sustenance/supplement people get from breathing and the surrounds is called the "Qi of Heaven" … and it's the Qi of Heaven that gives us the fatal flaw to the qi-paradigm.

 

The problem with the "Qi of Heaven" hypothesis is that while the inhale is used to pull inward the tissues of the body associated with respiration (truly, those would be "qi tissues"), the Chinese posited that at the same time we are breathing in an invisible, unmeasurable energetic aspect of "qi".  If you think about it, in those days they had no knowledge of the actions of oxygen on the body, or blood sugar, etc., so an etheric quantity called "qi" fit the bill admirably.  In traditional terms, if I "breathe qi in through my fingertips", I am simultaneously pulling inward along the involuntary-muscle/fascia layers extending to my fingertips and also pulling in the etheric qi along those same tissue channels.

 

Over time, because of the belief in an etheric, esoteric qi that came into the body with an inhale, the tradition came to be that when someone exhaled, the etheric qi settled into his mid-body at the dantian area.  In my years of experience and observation, I cannot point to any progress in my development that could not simply be attributed to the training of the elastic tissue and other controls with my deliberate breathing exercises.  If I "breathe in the qi through the yintang acupuncture point between my eyes", it is a productive training that strengthens an elastic channel from my sinus area to my stomach and lung area.  As a bonus to that one particular "pulling in the qi", I have learned to control the normally involuntary muscles around the sinus area and I have found out what the Chinese said "the sinuses are connected to the qi of the lungs".  Yes, you can feel the connection from lungs to sinuses with that exercise.

 

But the putative "etheric qi" is problematic.  The qi-paradigm was an attempt to explain the workings of the world long ago, before things like oxygen and blood sugar and genetics were understood by science, so an invisible fudge-factor like an etheric aspect of qi was just perfect.  The problem is that while the discovery of the body's built-in elastic system is a staggering addition to strength/power, it gets overshadowed with the idea of the etheric qi and how you "sink it to the dantian".  In actuality, you just let all qigong elastic releases end up in the dantian.

 

This post got started because of a question about the difference between the "functional qi" of the body's mechanisms and the "etheric qi".  They're part of the same general "qi", but the developments of the body that focus on an etheric qi often take some bizarre, unsupported turns.  I remember a story about Koich Tohei, of Aikido fame, showing some of his tangible qi/ki demonstrations and then asking a zen monk, who supposedly meditated on his qi/ki daily to demonstrate the same abilities.  The monk could not; his understanding of qi/ki was unsupported by the real world.  At the risk of getting lost in the weeds, I'll stop here.

 

Below is a picture of one tissue channel from the thumb inward toward the body center.  Notice the names of the way-stops and how they relate to bodies of water.  That is your qi-flow.

 

Next are two pictures from Mantak Chia's book Bone Marrow Nei Kung.  Mr. Chia is an anatomical illustrator who has been trained in various Chinese methods and he is simply illustrating here the common viewpoint of "breathing the qi in the channels at the tips of the fingers and toes".  His second illustration shows that with the pull-in of the skin with the inhale, there is also the idea that you have breathed in "energy" (qi) through the skin, particularly at joints and bone protrusions.